Opinion: The 10 highest-paid coaches in college basketball

While players get nothing, the top compensation for coaches is almost $10 million

By

JasonNotte

If colleges aren’t going to pay their basketball players, they and their deep-pocketed boosters may as well aim fire hoses of cash at their head coaches.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s member schools have learned from former UCLA star Ed O’Bannon’s successful antitrust suit against themthat March Madness is a lot more fruitful for the NCAA and its coaches than it is for most players. The NCAA reaps all the benefits of its 14-year, $10.8 billion deal with CBS
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and Time Warner’s
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Turner Sports to air March Madness. The networks, meanwhile, have pulled in $7.5 billion in ad revenue since 2005 just by airing the tournament.

March Madness, on the whole, is a bigger cash machine than the Super Bowl, drawing nearly 200 million more viewers than NFL playoff games. Yet the players see just about no benefit from it. The free education, you say? Tell that to Florida State, North Carolina and Syracuse University players who had work handed in for them by tutors or were registered in classes that never existed. Not only did university athletic departments exploit them for free labor and publicity, but their academic counterparts served as accomplices.

But we’re supposed to forget about all that and revel in the fact that 16 teams won two games apiece and get to play again this week. OK, fine. For the sake of argument, however, let’s just look at the database of NCAA men’s basketball coach salaries compiled by USA Today and the Indiana University National Sports Journalism Center. Maybe it’ll provide a sense of just how much money is flying around college basketball and why coaches in the top tiers may feel some sense of superiority to the administrators who supposedly serve as their bosses.

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10. Sean Miller, Arizona

Total pay: $2,200,000

Maximum bonus: $985,000

University president pay: Ann Weaver Hart, $475,000

He had a tough act to follow in longtime Arizona coach Lute Olson, but Miller has forged a fairly stellar resume of his own. In 11 years as a head coach with Xavier and Arizona, he’s missed the NCAA tournament only three times. He’s been to the Sweet 16 six times and the Elite Eight three times before this season. Meeting up with Xavier again in this year’s Sweet 16 likely wasn’t ideal, but it’s that resume, and some fine recruiting, that’s getting him those seven figures you see above.

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9. Josh Pastner, Memphis

Total pay: $2,650,000

Maximum bonus: $710,000

University president pay: M. David Rudd, $369,552

Yeah, maybe those 14 losses this past season don’t exactly reflect the paycheck. At only 37, however, he’s been groomed by Arizona’s Olson and Kentucky’s John Calipari and has led his Tigers to four NCAA tournament appearances in six seasons. Granted, the last time he got a sniff of the Final Four was as a player back when Arizona won the whole thing in 1997, but he has time to live up to Memphis’ investment. Maybe not as much as he thinks after a season like this, though.

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8. Thad Matta, Ohio State

Total pay: $3,182,000

Maximum bonus: $410,000

University president pay: Michael Drake, $1 million-plus

Dumped out of this year’s tournament in a 15-point, second-round loss to Arizona, Matta draws that paycheck because Ohio State knows he’ll be back in the tournament next year. In 11 seasons at Ohio State, he’s made a football school care about basketball by riding Greg Oden to the title game in 2007, returning to the Final Four in 2012, and making the tournament nine times in total. The only times he didn’t? In 2005, when Ohio State was ineligible and in 2008, when he ran the table at the National Invitation Tournament. As for President Drake, he has to feel a little disheartened considering former President Gordon Gee got more than $6 million in 2013 just to leave.

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